India’s (Jewish) Mother

How Mirra Alfassa went from being a French bohemian to an Indian goddess

By Michelle Goldberg

March 11, 2010 • 7:00 AM

Mirra Alfassa in Pondicherry, circa 1969.(Sri Aurobindo Ashram)

Outside the Manakula Vinayagar temple in Pondicherry, a former French colony in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a temple elephant named Lakshmi collects offerings of rupees with her trunk, blessing devotees and tourists alike with a pat on the head. White curlicues are painted on her face, bells hang around her neck, and silver jewelry adorns her ankles. Behind her, little stalls sell religious knickknacks—faux-sandalwood figurines of Hindu gods and a great profusion of framed pictures. It looks, in other words, like thousands of other temples throughout India, until you examine the pictures more closely. They’re of an old woman with hooded eyes and a cryptic closed-mouth smile who looks a bit like Hannah Arendt. Everyone refers to her as “The Mother,” but she was born Mirra Alfassa. The de facto goddess of this town is a Sephardic Jew from France.

Over the past 150 years, many Westerners have sought spiritual transcendence in India, and quite a few have been accepted and absorbed into Indian culture. The British radical Annie Besant, once one of the world’s most famous atheists, moved to India in the 1890s embracing Theosophy, the grandmother of modern new age movements. She became a major figure in the Indian independence movement and at one point was even elected president of the Indian National Congress. But even by India’s historically flamboyant standards, the spiritual career of the late Mirra Richard—Alfassa’s married name—is astonishing.

By chance, when I showed up in Pondicherry in February, it was the 50th anniversary of Mirra’s founding of the Sri Aurobindo Society, which is devoted to propagating the ideas of her close spiritual collaborator, the Indian freedom fighter-turned-yogi Sri Aurobindo. The society, which is headquartered in Pondicherry, sponsored an exhibition in a pavilion by the beach to commemorate the occasion. The Mother’s empty chair, draped in marigold silk, was part of the display, her old sandals in a glass box at the foot. Visitors, mostly Indian but a few Westerners too, bowed before it.

Though The Mother’s image is everywhere in Pondicherry, it’s not easy for the visitor to learn much that’s concrete about her life; the books for sale all tend toward dreamy, magic-filled hagiography. I got a useful clue, though, when I visited the Aurobindo Ashram in the town’s picturesque French quarter. On a bulletin board, there was a typed declaration from the ashram’s late director of physical education, a position that, I later learned, carried significant influence, because The Mother was serious about exercise. It warned Ashramites about a book called The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. “The distribution and sale of this book must be stopped,” it said. “Attempts must be made to procure and destroy all existing copies of this book, and to stop all future editions and reprints.”

Naturally, I went to track it down. The book, published by Columbia University Press, was actually written by the ashram’s chief archivist, Peter Heehs, but it takes a historical rather than devotional approach, enraging Aurobindo hardliners. Perhaps thanks to the Ashramite’s efforts, it’s not available in India, but you can read large parts of it online. From it, I learned about Alfassa’s early life in Paris in the late years of the 19th century, her art-school education and career as a painter, and her journey through Parisian occultist circles. “As a painter and wife of a painter, Mirra associated with artists, musicians and writers—among them Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Cesar Franck, Anatole France and Emile Zola,” Heehs writes. She reached adulthood in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, so while she was secular, her Judaism must have marked her. Perhaps it influenced her quest for a universal spirituality that could unite all of humanity.

For a while, Mirra was a follower of a mysterious figure named Max Théon (né Bimstein), a Polish Jew who had founded an organization called the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in Algeria, whose precepts may have been based on Kabbalah. So, by the time Mirra met Aurobindo, she was a seasoned spiritual seeker. She ended up in Pondicherry in 1914, when her second husband, a French lawyer named Paul Richard, sought political office there. At the time, the colony was still a part of France—indeed, that’s why Aurobindo made it his home. Before turning to spirituality, the Cambridge-educated Aurobindo had been an Indian freedom fighter and sought safety in French territory when he was wanted by the British.

In 1914, Mirra was 36, “a handsome woman, striking in her heavy makeup and high fashion,” in the words of Jeffery Paine, author of Father India: Westerners Under the Spell of an Ancient Culture. Soon, she and Aurobindo were working together intimately, pursuing a kind of East-West spiritual fusion, and under her organization, the Aurobindo ashram grew larger and more organized. As Mirra and Aurobindo became closer, they began to deify each other. “What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation, it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme,” she said at one point. Aurobindo, meanwhile, declared that Mirra was an incarnation of divine energy, the universal mother made flesh. In 1926, he gave her spiritual authority over all his disciples. Until he died in 1950, he communicated almost entirely through her.

Her teaching is almost indecipherable unless you’re willing to enter fully into her mental and symbolic world. One key event in her cosmology, for example, is “The Descent of the Supermind,” which is said to have happened on February 29, 1956. This involves a vision in which Mirra, in a “form of living gold, bigger than the universe,” shattered a massive golden door separating the worldly from the divine.

Yet as ethereal as all this sounds, Mirra, who died in 1973, succeeded in making some of her visions strikingly concrete. About eight kilometers outside of Pondicherry is Auroville, a utopian community Mirra founded in 1968 with the aim, as she wrote, of realizing human unity and hastening “the advent of supramental Reality upon earth.” Today, about 2,000 people from around 30 countries live there, spread out between 100 or so settlements with names like Sincerity and Surrender. Almost half are Indians, but there are hundreds of Europeans, around 75 Americans, a couple of dozen Israelis, and handfuls from countries are far-flung as Ethiopia, Japan, and Brazil. It’s separate from the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry—indeed, since The Mother’s death, there have been some ugly legal battles between the two institutions. But she’s worshipped in both places.

Aurovillians, as they call themselves, are free to build their own houses, though they don’t own them—everything belongs to Auroville. There are fairly basic huts but also big modernist homes—I saw one, in a settlement of mostly French and German families, with a small pool. A few hundred feet away was a café and gallery that I was told served Israeli food, but it was Saturday, and it was closed. Throughout Auroville, there are all sorts of experimental projects going on, many related to sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. It feels like a cross between a commune and the Dharma Initiative.

In the center of the community, both geographically and physically, is a massive spherical gold-plated structure called the Matmandir, or Temple of the Mother. According to Mirra, it is the “symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection.” It looks like some sort of UFO and leaves one agog at Mirra’s spiritual audacity.

She wasn’t the first Jew who sought to remake the world into a place where ethnic and nationalist categories were obsolete. And Auroville, which Mirra imagined as a futuristic city of 50,000 that would transform the world, has obviously fallen short of that goal. Living there, with its strange combination of anarchism and cultish orthodoxy, would probably be a nightmare. Still, its very existence in this obscure, murderously hot place has a touch of the miraculous about it.

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Goldberg writes that ‘the Mother’s teachings are almost indecipherable unless you’re willing to enter fully into her mental and symbolic world’. In this regard the Mother’s teachings follow exactly the character of the knowledge laid down in the Rig Veda. It is a knowledge of initiates which, according to Sri Aurobindo, ‘…cannot be attained either by logical reasoning or by scholastic investigation… the perfect truth of the Veda, where it is now hidden, can only be recovered by the same means by which it was originally possessed: Revelation and experience are the doors of the Spirit. This limitation, this necessity are the inexorable results of the very nature of Veda.’

The evolutionary identity of The Mother and the epochal significance of her Temple’s inner chamber are likewise a matter of revelation and gnosis. Both involve an understanding of the laws and principles governing a higher plane and a harmony between time and space, the mystery of which can only be unraveled through the knowledge of the appearance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on earth at this particular time and no other.

Jeanette Caurantsays:

March 12, 2010 - 10:17 am

It is mentioned that “In the center of the community, both geographically and physically, is a massive spherical gold-plated structure called the Matmandir, or Temple of the Mother.”
What is not widely known is that the Mother gave Her plan for the Matrimandir with exact measurements to those responsible to build according to that plan. The Matrimandir that stands in Auroville today was NOT build according to the Mother’s specifications and therefore is not the highest expression of Sacred Architecture we could have known. For more information on this you can go to http://www.matacom.com

Z. Levinesays:

March 12, 2010 - 12:43 pm

Thanks to Tablet (and to the two responses!) — I would NEVER have learned of this wildly obscure subject if not for this website.

For further reading, I recommend “Beyond the Human Species” (Paragon House, 1998) or “The Mother: the story of her life” by Georges Van Vrekhem.

kaangeyasays:

March 14, 2010 - 6:22 pm

The Mother lived in Puduchery for decades and is much beloved by its denizens for a reason. The people of the fair city would be surprised if you told them that The Mother’s teachings are obscure and abstruse. Because that is not how they related to her. This is a mistake every observer and commentator makes about understanding the dharmic traditions. First reduce a person or a people to a few essential entities and then examine those entities to the death. We dharmics work very differently, we experience and then create our own lives with the guidance we obtain from other seekers and seers. Goldberg should have talked to the people who live by the seanear Auroville and asked them about their interactions with the people of Auroville. This is no closed cult.

Yossisays:

March 17, 2010 - 2:13 pm

Exodus 20:

1 And God spoke all these words, saying:
2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

Jayana Clerksays:

May 27, 2010 - 1:02 pm

What does Goldberg imply by “the touch of the miraculous” at the end of our piece? I appreciate Heehs book and his approach as well as Goldberg’s. But I wonder if she could expand “the touch of the miraculous” –the essence of Auroville and the Matrimandir. I felt the deep reosnance of the place during my visit to Pondicherry Ashram. Exposure to a mystical/spiritual place often touches the soul of a sensitive casual observer by its magic — without it the picture remains incomplete and also, I think, meaningless.

Mirasays:

September 14, 2010 - 11:07 pm

THE WRITER OBVIOUSLY HAS NO CLUE ABOUT THE MOTHER’S PROTECTION AND GRACE. WITHOUT A COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THIS WONDERFUL MAHASHAKTI; ONE HAS TO FEEL ASHAMED OF COLLATING A BIASED PIECE.

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Sas98says:

September 29, 2012 - 4:17 pm

The write up sucks like a vacuum pump.

Francessays:

April 27, 2014 - 2:14 am

I can’t believe how much racist you or your ethic/racial + ideological Group are. I wonder when you’ll start to sincerely appreciate Others [the Way you personally claim ”the Mother” was meant to do] and be thankful toward Them, since they are able and teach you [and your Group] many Values that you [your Group] concretely miss, since the only Concern you have, it appears to be … your own Supremacism upon Others. It seems that your only Concern is to show how much superior you [your Group <– self appointed ''elected Race/ethnic Group'' and/or ''elected People'' and/or ''elected ideological Group'' (see: the Bible as so to say ''holy Book'' or ''Guide Book'', as much as other supremacist Groups use other Books)] are. It is Time [that's called ''the new Era'', the Golden One, for you to accept and admire Others, and show Thankfulness to them, instead of wasting your Energies and Money in trying to show how great you [your Group] are. India is the Country of the Bagavad Gita, of Buddhism, of Indian People: out of Respect for Others [since you are a Group which expect to be respected by Others and keeps mourning about the Injustices It endured from Others <– though, you are very weak when it comes to (very much needed) Self criticism, which is, instead, the Base of Wisedom/Equanimity/Compassion (if you like to be wise, equanimous and compassionate, well understood)]. The economical and financial Power your Group gained during Centuries, grant you several wordly Possibilities to keep dominating Others, and Medias, but at a spiritual, divine Level you're very poor: Supremacism is the Highway to Slavery, to Priviledges versus Discriminations <– and you [your Group] practice Supremacism. Supremacism is ununiversal, unloveful toward Every1, and definitely unenlightened. Inner Happiness/Goodness and outer Happiness/Power to … Every1. Shalom [a Kind of Peace which should mean: Equanimity] <– the Foundation for inner PEACE remembers that ''None is special''.

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